A Year Later: Getting Kicked out of the Recurse Center

Sunday May 11, 2025 — New York, NY

It’s been a year since I (and, at the same time, my partner) was kicked out of the Recurse Center.

During Never Graduate Week last year, I ran a event for folks to come together and brainstorm what a more community-driven Recurse Center could look like. I also sent out a Polis poll to get an idea of how other people in the community were feeling about the state of RC. I sent out the poll somewhat hastily, mostly in annoyance with a statement that one of the faculty members made during the “State of RC” talk: that the people who were frustrated with the implementation of the “no politics at RC” rule were a “vocal minority”. Perhaps that’s true, but in my view, the faculty had not made any attempt to gather data on people’s feelings about the matter, so I sent out the poll in a attempt to rectify that, as well as to capture any other thoughts that people had about the state of RC.

I had felt that the conversations around making RC more community-driven, while contentious and draining, were ultimately productive. A small group of people who attended the meeting offered to work with the faculty to help re-draft some language in the Code of Conduct, which the faculty had been meaning to do for months but had not gotten to. I reached out to a faculty member on behalf of that group, and the faculty member expressed openness to the idea of looking at a draft of such a change written by community members.

The Monday after NGW, I received a email informing me that I had been removed from the Recurse Center community. This came as quite a shock to me, especially given that the Code of Conduct stated that in cases like mine, people would get a warning before being kicked out — warning which I was not given.

At the same time, my partner, Alistair, got a email informing them that they had been removed from the Recurse Center community. They were not given any reason for this removal, and despite many people asking the faculty on Zulip to provide a reason, they have consistently refused to do so. I know one person who was told in a 1:1 conversation with the faculty that Alistair was kicked out because they were “especally disruptive” — which is something rather hard for me to wrap my head around, given that their only recent interactions with the Recurse Center community had been attending my community-driven RC event, and attending the NGW picnic — they had wanted to attend more events at NGW, but fell sick for most of the week, and so were unable to attend any other events. I do hope to one day hear a actual explanation for this, and I hope folks in the community continue to press the faculty about it.

I may be “no longer a member of the Recurse Center community” in the eyes of the faculty, but in my view, a community is a network of people who care for each other, and I still feel embedded in the Recurse Center community in that sense. It felt very healing for me to speak at !!Con last year, to see so many friends there, and to hear from the organizers that they were glad that !!Con is not a official Recurse Center event, since that meant that that I could be there.

In a attempt to see Recurse Center friends again, I’m going to be in NYC for this Never Graduate Week. I’ll be sitting outside 397 Bridge St, seeing old friends, and perhaps even making new ones as well. I’m not sure exactly which days I’ll be around, but if you want to book some time to go for a walk and chat, I’ve made a Calendly link for people to do that. I will add new days as I become aware of my schedule, I will definitely be around Monday, and likely other days as well. I’d also love to get meals with groups of people. The intellectual energy of the Recurse Center bubbling with people is lovely, and I hope to be able to capture some of that.

I will also have many zines and stickers to give out, so say hi if you want to grab some!

I meant to write a lot more about getting kicked out of the Recurse Center when it happened, but I didn’t, for a variety of reasons. Largely, I was moving upstate the week after NGW, then planning a large group camping trip, but I also have felt less desire to write publicly these days, about all sorts of topics. I do intend to return to publishing my writing soon, though.

The thing I had most been meaning to write about was the nature of the “no politics” rule at RC, what it seemed to me to be trying to accomplish, and where it failed at that. I’ll write some thoughts about that here, in hopes that it might be able to catalyze some discussion at NGW this year — I heard from a lot of folks that my getting kicked out had a chilling effect on how willing people were to be critical of RC, but I hope that people can find the courage and openness to continue to talk about how to make RC as good as it can be.

The idea of “no politics”, or “politics in opt-in spaces only”, as I understand it, is to avoid distractions. Recurse Center is a place for programming, and political discussion tends to be charged and difficult to ignore. You might be sitting there programming away, when you hear a political discussion and get sucked in, or in the best case, lose focus trying to tune it out. I agree with the goal of this — I appreciate that RC can be a space of focus, and that the kinds of distractions that exist (of which there are many) tend to be delightful little technical problems, rather than doom and despair.

Unfortunately, I think the rule as it’s written fails to accomplish this goal in a few ways:

• There are many topics that are highly distracting that are not political. For instance, I regularly talked to people at RC who felt upset and distracted hearing people talk about job searching, and I have at times felt that way myself. But there’s no “hey, can you take political talk to a opt-in space?” equivalent for such conversations — it feels imposing to ask people to do that, in the absence of a social expectation about it.
• The meaning of “political” is ill-defined — for instance, I have zero interest in hearing people discussing elections and polls — but for me, making the choice to use SQLite and statically link my binaries is tied in with my political opinions — that the centralization of power is bad, and making software radically easier to run is a absolutely necessary step to decentralize the enormous amount of political power that the technology industry wields. You can talk about things like ActivityPub and BitTorrent without talking about politics, but doing so misses a enormous part of why these technologies are designed in the way that they are.
• People don’t actually follow it. If you go to RC when a lot of people are there, you will inevitably here people talking about politics. It’s quite rare for these conversations, in the physical space, to be moved to opt-in spaces. If people are constantly breaking a rule, and no one is saying anything about it, it seems like that rule is in need of some adjusting!

I personally think a rule against distracting conversations except in opt-in spaces would be much more fit for purpose, with examples of things that would and would not fall under such a rule.

I’m curious how the “no politics” rule is holding up to the authoritarian shift that the tech industry is seeing more broadly — I’m told that in the months after the United States’ presidential election, any discussion by people who worked in the government about their jobs became considered “political”, and thus needed to be in opt-in spaces. I don’t know how RC is going to square being progressive (in embracing diversity in a lot of good ways) with being apolitical — I think in 2013 or 2014, in the early days of RC, “apolitical progressivism” was a view that made a kind of sense if you squinted at it. Today, we have no such privilege.

Finally, I’ll say that I reached out to faculty members a couple times after I was kicked out to see about talking, and getting some closure. I’ve gotten no reply, but it’s still something I hope to do. I get the feeling that the faculty thought that they could kick me out and I would simply vanish from their world, and in stubbornly showing up at NGW to sit outside, I hope I can show that that’s simply not true. In a world of rapidly deteriorating social fabric, I continue to believe in repair. I would love to understand the perspective of the faculty, and I hope to someday have the privilege of hearing it.

See folks soon,

:w

☙